“I worry for you, lass,” Dame Ross said. She looked in the basket.
Blanche shook her head. “No mending for the queen.”
“Any trouble?” the Laundress asked.
“No Galles in the corridors. The queen’s new ladies were a treat though.” No palace servant ever spoke slightingly of any member of the upper classes-not directly. It was all tone and eye contact, nothing that could be reported or punished.
Goodwife Ross narrowed her eyes. “Anything I should know?”
“Lady Agnes suggested that I had no business in the queen’s chambers. And me in my livery!” Blanche spat her words with more vehemence than she’d intended.
The Laundress pursed her lips. “I see,” she said.
Blanche dropped a short curtsey-the bob of the working woman. “I’ll be about it then, ma’am,” she said.
Goodwife Ross dismissed her with a wave. The goodwife was aware-in the vaguest way-that Blanche “did something” for the queen. That was sufficient for her.
Blanche took her basket into the steamy main laundry. The moment she upended it on the sorting table, her life as the queen’s messenger vanished to be replaced by her usual life.
“Blanche! There you are! Be a sweet and fetch us a cup of water?” asked rheumy old Mother Henk.
“Blanche, you promised to teach me stem stitch!” begged young Alice.
“Blanche, there’s a mort of fine sewing waiting in your basket and I’ve all I can do keeping the King in braes,” snapped Ellen. Ellen was the other upper palace laundress who wore livery and was allowed to collect laundry in the public rooms of the palace. Like Blanche, she was young, pretty, and had worked in the palace since she’d been a young child.
By that point in her work day, Blanche was delighted to collapse onto one of the backed chairs that the fine sewers used while mending. From the pockets under her kirtle, Blanche fetched out her prize possession-her sewing kit, with a pair of steel scissors made by Master Pye himself, a pair of silver thimbles, a dozen fine horn thread winders full of threads-white linen, white silk, black linen, black silk, and this season, red and blue for the livery.
Ellen was putting thread on her winders. Thread came from the dyers in skeins, and sewing women and tailors had to wind it onto something of their own. Blanche owned two beautiful thread winders-a tiny one of ivory that had been her mother’s and another of mother of pearl from far off Ifriquy’a. Both were at home.
“If the King wears his hose any tighter,” Ellen said and shook her head. Laid across her lap were a fanciful pair of hose, one leg alternating diagonals of red and blue, the other leg solid scarlet with a patch of superb gold embroidery. The hose were in the latest style that joined at the top, and they had torn in the crotch.
“He’s too old for these tight things,” Ellen said. A year ago, open criticism of the king’s taste in clothes would never have been uttered. Blanche felt disloyal just listening.
Ellen frowned, aware of her transgression. “I only mean…” She paused. And looked down at her scarlet thread winder. She finished it off and then loaded her blue.
Her thought was unspoken, but they didn’t need to share it. Blanche knew that Ellen’s criticism was not for the King, but for his new lover, a red-headed girl of seventeen. Lady Jane Sable. Her name was never mentioned in the servants’ halls below. She seemed to inspire in the King a sort of ferocity to pretend he was young, and his pursuit of youth-hers, his own-had led to a loss of royal dignity that all the servants felt reflected on them.
Lady Jane was herself not so bad. She was well-bred enough to be careful; she was cautious about the king’s reputation, and she was polite to the servants. But she had her own waiting woman, Sarah, and her laundry never came to the laundry. Sarah ate in her mistress’s rooms and never came into the great hall below stairs where the servants dined and many slept. The lady’s father was already the leader of the pro-Galle faction of Albans.
Blanche began to repair the queen’s shifts. She had patiently run up half a dozen new ones that suited the queen’s changed shape, working at home with her mother, and now even the new shifts were having their carefully felled side-seams pulled.
Blanche pulled a small seam-ripper-a razor sharp knife with a rebated point, just a few inches long, and another product of Master Pye’s superb eye and hand-from her basket and began to open a side seam.
“Blanche!” called Goodwife Ross. Blanche rose to her feet, dropped her sewing into the basket beside the chair and rushed to the Laundress, whose commands were not to be ignored. She still had her little knife in her hand-it was precious, five days’ wages’ worth of steel and it would slice through her pockets in a heartbeat. She tucked it behind her ear.
“Blanche, I need you to run a message to Master Cord’s down Cheapside. And ask where our spring linen order is. I’m that vexed and I misremembered this morning.”
Indeed, the whole establishment ate fine white linen the way a newborn suckled milk, and Master Cord’s later delivery was playing merry hell with the laundry.
Blanche bobbed a curtsey.
“I’ll have Ellen finish the shifts,” Goodwife Ross said.
Blanche shook her head-one tiny sideways motion to indicate disagreement was allowed in senior staff. “I’ll take it home, if’n it please you, ma’am.”
Goodwife Ross nodded her strong approval. “Good. Ellen has her hands full. Fetch your basket and skip along.”
Blanche stepped back into the seamstress’s room and re-packed her basket.
Ellen sighed. “A nice spring day? I’d like to be sent with the errands.”
Blanche frowned. “Goodwife worries about ye, Ellen.”
“I can handle myself,” the young woman said. But where Blanche was tall and broad shouldered, Ellen was doll-like and slim as a reed. The strength of Blanche’s arms and hands was legendary among the pages and squires to whom she’d taught a few manners-even before the Galles came.
“None of us can handle the Galles,” Blanche said. “Are you careful when you walk out? Never the same route twice?”
“Yes, Mother,” Ellen said, and laughed. “May I please have another cup of milk?” Both girls laughed. “But Blanche, ain’t you a Galle?”
Blanche nodded. “My pater was, sure enough.” Blanche de Roeun, a town in Galle, once. Now she was Blanche Gold.
Ellen shrugged. “So there are some good Galles.”
Blanche frowned. “Some? These are a blight. Galles is lovely folk, Ellen. Think of the Count D’Eu!”
Ellen smiled. Both girls admired him. “Well, if you’ll not tell me how to walk and suck eggs, I’ll not twit you with your Galles.”
Blanche grinned. “Sorry, sweet.”
“You be careful,” Ellen said.
Blanche kissed her on the cheek. “Always careful, my honey.”
She was out the door of the laundry, under full sail as Ellen, a shipwright’s daughter, liked to say. Blanche did not generally enter or leave the palace in broad daylight. She came so early in the morning that the squires weren’t up, and she left when they started drinking. But she’d hurt one of the Galles-and she knew that they had her marked.
Past the water-gate corridor.
But the main hall corridor up the stairs was crowded with gentles. She knew from the bottom of the steps, just from their shoes-mostly long-toed poulains-that she was looking at Rohan’s crowd; a dozen Gallish knights and squires. The worst.
She froze, her foot on the third step.
“There’s a pretty slut,” someone said above her.
“Thighs as white as her name, I’ll bet,” said another.
She knew them all, even if they didn’t know her. Rohan was the very worst-the centre of the poison, so to speak. His eyes crossed hers.
She dropped her eyes and passed back a step.
“The king!” someone shouted, and all the courtiers stiffened. That would mean that the King was passing from his apartments to the great hall. Courtiers lined the corridor, hoping to be recognized and spoken to.